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Reviewed by Andrew Carnie, Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona

1. INTRODUCTION

The status of the requirement that every sentence have a subject, which has come to be known in the principles and parameters framework as the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) (Chomsky 1981), has been a mystery since its discovery. Why should such a restriction exist on the grammar? Various attempts have been made to explain it, ranging from a semantic requirement that there be something that serves as the argument of predication to a structural requirement that specifiers be projected (Lasnik 2001). Sabine Mohr's ''Clausal Architecture: Impersonal constructions in the Germanic languages'', a published version of the author's dissertation, is an important contribution to this discussion. Comparing impersonal, existential and related constructions across the Germanic languages, she argues that the EPP is really a multi-source, multi-faceted phenomenon. Some EPP properties are due to simple feature checking (semantic and formal) and some are due to a last resort effect arising due to an interaction of feature checking and the extension condition. Mohr (henceforth SM) argues that not all ''expletives'' are equal: there are at least three distinct types found in the Germanic languages. She shows that cross-linguistic variation in the structure and availability of impersonal type constructions in the Germanic language family is due to lexical parameterization in terms of the degree and type of V-movement, the type of verb second (V2) effect, and the availability of the different kinds of expletives. SM also provides some convincing and important arguments that head-movement is part of narrow syntax (contra Chomsky 1995).

2. SUMMARY

After a brief outline of the issues involved and a discussion of organization, the book is divided into two parts. The first part is primarily ''theoretical'' (although it contains much empirical data) and is titled Clausal Architecture and the EPP. The second part concerns the details of the derivation of impersonal, existential and related constructions in the various Germanic languages.

Chapter 1 surveys the literature on the EPP. This is an excellent review of the issues and analyses that have been proposed for the phenomenon. SM identifies as crucial ideas: the question of whether the EPP is tied to a feature or features and to a particular cartographic position or positions; the role of head-movement in explaining language variation (after Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998); and the link between V2 and EPP effects (Roberts and Rousseau 2002, Roberts 2005).

Chapter 2 contains the heart of the proposal about the relationship between head-movement, the EPP and V2. SM makes two potential controversial claims here. First, she dissociates the EPP from the notion of ''subject''. Second she claims that head-movement is fully syntactic and belongs to narrow syntax. In defense of the latter claim she presents important evidence that important semantic effects are tied to head movement (such as the licensing of NPIs). If head-movement were merely a PF phenomenon, the semantic sensitivity of these effects would not be found.

Chomsky (1995) claimed that head-movement could not be part of narrow syntax because it is counter-cyclic and non-structure preserving. Given a head A and a phrase XP, application of MERGE to these items results in a new object (AP). Head to head adjunction of some other head B to A, results in a new category {<A,A> {A, B}}. This new element destroys the derivational relationship between AP and A. In order to rule this out, he proposes the Extension Condition (EC), which limits MERGE and MOVE operations in that they may only target the root.

This theoretical claim is at odds with the syntactic evidence that head movement is part of narrow syntax. SM proposes a loophole to resolve this tension. She suggests that if head-movement applies to check some feature on the head, then some concomitant XP must move to extend the root. This can happen to check a contentful feature (such as a focus feature, or a topic feature), a formal feature like Case, or may apply to check a last-resort EPP feature to save the derivation from crashing. SM proposes the following revised version of the EC:

The New Extension Condition (SM: 50) A given category C is EC-compatible if C is extended at the root once all F[C] formal features of C... entering into checking operations are checked.

In effect, evaluation of the EC does not occur at the time of head-movement, instead it is delayed until an XP expands at the root, thus technically satisfying the constraint. I have some technical concerns about this version of the EC, which I will return to in the evaluation section below. However, one aspect of this proposal is very pleasing; it explains the link between the movement of a head and the at least partly free movement of an XP, which could be extended to Holmberg's-generalization-type effects (see Holmberg 1999 for discussion of these effects).

Chapter 3 sketches out SM's claims about the cartographic properties of the clause structure. She adopts the assumptions that functional categories are tied one-to-one to features, and that multiple specifiers are impossible. She proposes that the C-system, I-system and V-system each include some number of Topic and Focus heads. The C-system additionally includes Force and Finiteness (Rizzi 1997); the I-system includes a Ref head for definite subjects, and both T and Aux heads; and finally the V-system also included v and V heads. She claims that V2 is not a uniform phenomenon even within a single language. Stress and information structure properties lead to an analysis such that different phrases in the C-system might be targeted. In the event that there is no information structure dependent feature at play triggering the XP movement, then a ''subject of predication'' (sop) feature (Cardinaletti 2002) comes into play on the FIN head. This feature, and in other circumstances the Topic and Focus features, trigger head movement of the finite verb, this in turn triggers the movement of the XPs due to the revised EC.

Chapter 4 is our first light into how the system accounts for differences among languages. This analysis relies on two slightly non-standard assumptions about feature checking in spec/head relations. First, the checking of a feature can either apply directly to the XP in the specifier, or to an XP within the specifier of the YP occupying the specifier of the head. Secondly, if the latter option is chosen, it only occurs if neither of the two elements has moved on (in SM's terminology such a relation is said to be ''active''). How this works is exemplified in the difference between English and German. English allows movement of a DP in the specifier of TP for nominative checking. For reasons to be explained below, German does not; instead a remnant vP, containing the DP, but not the v+V complex, moves to the specifier of TP. This DP checks its case through the specifier of a specifier mechanism. This explains verb finality in non-V2 contexts in German (the verb has raised to T, the vP remnant moves to spec, TP thus preceding it.)

The analysis is actually significantly more intricate than this however. The type of V-movement is crucial to understanding word order variation. SM proposes four distinct types of languages with respect to V-movement. As a matter of clarification, it should be noted that V-movement in SM's system is refers only to V (not v, not Aux). First, there are languages with no V movement, such as the OV orders found in embedded clauses in many Germanic languages. (SM claims, contra Kayne 1994, that OV is the universal underlying order). Then there are languages with short v to V movement, such as English and the non-V2 orders of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The V2 orders of all the languages except English involve long V movement, to at least T. Finally, Icelandic embedded orders are derived through ''morphological'' short V-movement which amounts to merger-under-adjacency rather than true movement, as it does not trigger the EC-effects predicted from the analysis in chapter 2.

If the EPP is an effect that is motivated by greater structural considerations and extends to V2 and other kinds of specifier head relations, then what are we to make of the more traditional ''specifier of TP effects'' found in languages like English, which have no V to T movement (recall that head movement is the trigger for EPP effects in SM's system). SM reduces most of these cases to nominative case checking, however other cases reduce to an s.o.p. feature on T. This is the topic of the fifth chapter. The sixth chapter is a summary of the first part of the book.

The seventh chapter is a nice summary and description of the cross-linguistic variation in the phenomena under consideration in the second part of the book (impersonal passives, transitive expletive constructions (TECs), existential constructions, weather constructions and impersonal psych-verb constructions.) The eighth and ninth chapters analyze these constructions using the tools provided in the first part of the book, in coordination with a fine-grained analysis of expletive types, where true expletives are distinguished from quasi-arguments (in weather constructions) and locative/temporal expletives (e.g., 'there' - SM calls these ''event'' arguments, I use the more restrictive locative/temporal expletive terminology here because I don't want to confuse these with the more usual neo-Davidsonian meaning of the term ''event argument/event variable''.) Variation among languages in the range of impersonal constructions and restrictions on these constructions is controlled by the complex interplay of what V-movement types are available, whether the language is V2 or not, and what expletive types the language has. The tenth chapter is a summary of the second part of the book, and the eleventh is a conclusion tying the two parts of the book together.

3. EVALUATION

SM has written an important contribution not only to our understanding of the EPP, but also has extended our understanding of variation within Germanic, and has provided some important insights about clausal cartography and the properties of head movement.

The analyses she proposes are intricate and complex, but they demonstrate the importance of comparative syntax. The subtleties in variation among and within languages point to a fine-grained analysis using a variety of mechanisms and tools. These kinds of issues would not be available to an author who worked only within a single language.

While I have a great regard for this work, I also have some concerns about the details of some of the analysis, and want to express a minor frustration about the structure of the book, but these do not take away from the timeliness and relevance of the volume.

Let me start with my structural complaint. As mentioned above the book deals with an incredibly complex range of phenomena, and weaves together the strands of an equally complex analysis. It's quite short at 200 pages, and it is very densely written. While it contains frequent and excellent summaries, the book could have stood to be at least 100 pages longer in its explication of the data and the analysis. Frequently, I found important descriptions of sentential derivations expressed solely in prose. The book is environmentally friendly in the sense it contains very few trees; a few more would have gone a long way to making the prose descriptions come to life. I found myself on numerous occasions having to draw out the tree myself to figure out important details of the analysis. Relatedly, many significant and important claims weren't expressed in any detail in the book. For example, the claim that all languages are underlyingly OV isn't proven or worked out in detail, similarly the claims about subject and topic positions in the I-system are skeletal. The level of detail here is probably appropriate for a dissertation (which this is), but a book length treatment could have benefited significantly from some fleshing out.

I have a more serious concern about the details of the revised extension condition in chapter 3. The analysis given here is an ingenious way of motivating the relation between head-movement and XP movement, and it is a fine technical revision to Chomsky's formalization of the EC. However, it completely fails to account for the underlying motivation of the EC. The EC was meant as a structure preservation mechanism. Head movement, even under the characterization given in this book, is devastatingly counter-cyclic and structure changing. This is made most obviously when we consider the steps in a BPS theoretic derivation (although the same point is true of a tree theoretic derivation). Given some XP, and a head A drawn from the numeration, we create the object Z = {AP, {A, XP}} (leaving aside any qualms we might have about the label AP). Let us say we move some B, a head in XP, and adjoin it to the head A, this results in the object Y ={<A,A> {A, B}}. Now the original object A contained in Z is now contained in Y, but crucially not in Z. Z is no longer well formed, because it now should contain <A,A> (Z' = {<A,A>, XP}. <A,A> was never merged with XP, so the object Z' is not the result of MERGE thus not a legitimate object. SM's analysis simply gets around the EC, without resolving the motivation that lay behind it, thus defeating the purpose of having the EC in the first place. On the other hand, the revised EC that SM proposes is very satisfying in the way it motivated V2-like effects. I'm also very sympathetic to the idea that head-movement is syntactic, indeed the empirical evidence for this seems to be overwhelming, but I don't think SM's revised EC solves the technical problem that Chomsky was trying to control for, even if it does give an elegant solution to V2 effects.

4. CONCLUSION

Despite my critiques in section 3 above, I have a very positive view of this book. It provides an intriguing and important contribution to the literature on Germanic comparative syntax, the literature on clausal cartography, and the literature on the EPP. The intricate analysis also makes some strong typological predictions that I look forward to seeing tested against languages from other language families.

Roberts, I. and Roussou A. 2002. The extended projection principle as a condition on the tense dependency. Pp. 125-155 in P. Svenonious, ed. Subjects Expletives and the EPP. Oxford: OUP.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrew Carnie is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. His interests include formal approaches to word order (in particular VSO languages) and phrase structure. He is the author of 5 books including the upcoming second edition of his introductory syntax textbook: Syntax: A Generative Introduction.
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